Category: Odds + Ends

UnsplashI spent yesterday at the Women’s March on Washington- MN in St. Paul, joining 100,000 (100,000!) others to stand in solidarity with one another and with the freedoms we fear this new presidency will curtail (if not abandon all together). We the people – women, and men, and LGBTQIA-identifying people, children and families, and elderly people with walkers, and mother wearing their sleeping babies, school-age kids with signs they made themselves (Please Trump be nice, one read). It was an incredible, invigorating, and hopeful day. Representative Ilhan Omar told us: “Remember you are might, you are powerful, and you will never be defeated.” I said afterwards that it felt like we all showed up to make a promise to one another that this will be where it starts, not where it ends.

It was a powerful, powerful day, but it/the whole week was also powerfully exhausting. I’m deviating from my regular rhythm of long essays to share a handful of goodness from the past week or so.

LISTENING: Y’all, my love of podcasts runs deep (especially when road closures extend my commute even further). I listened to a lot of My Favorite Murder this past week, because I needed to clear up the backlog of episodes, and because the hosts, Georgia Hardstark and Karen Killgariff are so funny. I also caught up on The Hilarious World of Depression. The first few episodes of this new show coincided with the bluest of my blue December days, and it was a double gift to listen to funny people talk about their experiences with mental illness. Fresh Air is a perennial favorite, but what was transcendent was this conversation from 2015 between Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, both “brilliant women who are also total babes.”

READING: The first two books I read in 2017 were excellent. The first, Julia Glass’ Three Junes, a novel from 2003 that my mom passed along to me a few months ago, was the beautiful, elegant vehicle that I needed to process through my grandfather’s death. Glass wrote a novel that lets you hold life and death in both hands without either becoming heavier than they aught. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and it’s made me think again about my first, unfinished novel. After Three Junes, I jumped back into Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, and devoured the the 300 pages I had left in two days. I came to this memoir as a fan, and on those terms, it could do no wrong, but this book can succeed on its own. What I found in Springsteen’s writing was an incredibly thoughtful meditation on the intersection between creating art and creating a self.

“I fought my whole life, studied, played, worked, because I wanted to hear and know the whole story, my story, our story, and understand as much of it as I could. I wanted to understand in order to free myself of its most damaging influences, its malevolent forces, to celebrate and honor its beauty, its power, and to be able to tell it well to my friends, my family, and to you.”

WRITING: Editing, technically, a short story I’m very excited about. I don’t love writing short fiction, and only do it “when inspiration strikes” (a habit that’s total shit when it comes to my longer projects), but I find that I return to short stories when I’m stymied by whatever long project I’m working on. Right now, and I’ll probably write about this soon, I’m feeling haunted by my first novel. Can I ever really move on to a new novel if this one remains in a state of undone?

WATCHING: A very soft New Year’s resolution was to cut back on my TV watching. I love well made television, and have no shame over how much of it I’ve watched, but it can get consuming (especially when I re-watch all of Sex and the City even though I’ve seen it + hate it). But, this week, I dug Planet Earth out of the movie collection, and watched two episodes back to back: Mountains and Freshwater. Watching Planet Earth was the viewing equivalent of a massage. The big, beautiful, overwhelming, vast and complex world we live in is mesmerizing. It gave me the most peace I’ve had in a few weeks.

Hello

I'm Torrie + this is my virtual home. Just like in my real home, I'm vulnerable, and honest, and try hard not to apologize for it. You'll find musings on creativity, writing, humanness, and the work of becoming. Join me!